The origin of the Mardaites has been a subject of great controversy over the years.1 The first point to realize as one begins to investigate their origin is that the surviving sources for their origin – such as Theophanes Confessor, Agapius, Michael the Syrian, the anonymous author of the Chronicle of 1234 – all derive their information from a common Syriac source, now lost, apparently composed c.750.2 For the most part, such differences as exist between their accounts are due to editorial interference during the process of transmission. The second point to realize is that the Mardaites were alive and well, and probably already settled in Attaleia in Pamphylia where they served as oarsmen and marines in the fleet of the Cibyrrhaeot Theme, by the time that the author of the common Syriac source was writing c.750.3 One has to remember, therefore, that the author of the common Syriac source, or subsequent transmitters of his text, may have been influenced in their depiction of the Mardaites by a knowledge of their contemporary status as oarsmen and marines in the Byzantine fleet.

In his notice for the 9th year of Constantine (676/77) and the 22nd year of Mu‘āwiya, Theophanes introduces the Mardaites, as follows:

In this year the Mardaites entered the Lebanon range and made themselves masters from the Black Mountain as far as the Holy City and captured the peaks of Lebanon. Many slaves, captives, and natives took refuge with them, so that in a short time they grew to many thousands. When Mavias and his advisers had learnt of this, they were much afraid, realizing that the Roman empire was guarded by God. So he sent ambassadors to the emperor Constantine, asking for peace and promising to pay yearly tribute to the emperor.4

He has combined his information concerning the Mardaites from the common Syriac source with his information concerning the treaty between Mu‘āwiya and Constantine which he derived from his Constantinopolitan source to make it seem that Mu‘āwiya was forced to enter into treaty-negotiations because of the activities of the Mardaites. In contrast, Nicephorus states that he was forced to enter into treaty-negotiations because of the destruction of his fleet at Syllaium.5 The other main witnesses to the Syriac source preserve similar notices concerning the Mardaites. Hence the Chron. 1234 records:

In the ninth year of his [Constantine’s] reign certain Romans launched an invasion of Mount Lebanon from the sea, landing on the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. They were called the Mardaites and they controlled the heights from the

Galilee to the Black Mountain, sallying out all the time into Arab territory to plunder and destroy.6

If one accepts this information at face value, the common Syriac source seems to have reported that the Mardaites attacked the Phoenician coast and proceeded to take control of a large stretch of mountainous country from the Black Mountain, that is, the Amanus, north of Antioch in Syria, as far south as the Holy City, that is, Jerusalem. This would have been a stunning military achievement, and one wonders that their apparent threat to, or even occupation of, such an important center as Jerusalem, has not left a greater mark in our sources. One is also left somewhat puzzled by their apparent aims or strategy. It would surely have made better sense in the long run to have tried to capture some of the ports along the Phoenician coast and fortify these, so that they would be better able to maintain communications with their master in Constantinople, than to scurry up into the mountains and isolate themselves there.

Part of the answer to this problem lies in the realization that someone made a serious mistake at an early stage during the transmission of this tradition. The key point here is that the town of Cyrrhus in northern Syria was also known as Hagioupolis, literally ‘Holy City’.7 Cyrrhus was situated a relatively short distance north of Antioch, and both lay on the eastern flank of the Amanus. It would have made far better geographical sense had someone originally described the settlement of the Mardaites along the Black Mountain, that is, the Amanus, from Antioch to Hagioupolis, that is, Cyrrhus, rather than from the Black Mountain to the Holy City, that is, Jerusalem. Indeed, one notes that Michael the Syrian specifically states that the Arabs settled the Slavs who defected to their side at a great battle near Caesarea in Cappadocia following the renewal of war between Justinian and ‘Abd al-Malik at Antioch and Cyrrhus.8 Unfortunately, one mistake leads to another. Once someone had confused Cyrrhus with Jerusalem so that the Mardaites seemed to rule from the Amanus to Jerusalem, it was inevitable that someone, perhaps the same author, should add by way of amplification or clarification that they ruled Mount Lebanon as well as the Amanus. Alternatively, the name of Mount Lebanon may have originated as a mistaken correction of the name of Mount Amanus. Furthermore, the author of this error may have been encouraged in this mistake by the knowledge that a certain Theodore had led a group of Lebanese in rebellion against the Arabs c.760.9 Whatever the case, it is clear that the Mardaites had no connection whatsoever to the Lebanon. Whoever they were, they occupied a strip of territory in and about Antioch and Cyrrhus in northern Syria.

It is hardly a coincidence that the Mardaites returned to the Byzantine empire from in and about Antioch and Cyrrhus in 685, in accordance with the treaty between Justinian and ‘Abd al-Malik, and that ‘Abd al-Malik settled the Slavic defectors to the Arab side at the battle near Caesarea in Cappadocia c.694 at these same towns. The obvious inference is that he settled the Slavs in the exact quarters which the Mardaites had occupied previously, but which were still vacant by 694. This immediately raises a question as to the status of the Mardaites. Had they been settled there as deserters from the Byzantine army also ? At this point, one must turn to the description of the treaty of 685 as preserved by the Spanish Chronicle of 741.10 It describes how the caliph Marwān, by which it obviously means ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwān, was forced

by the second Arab civil-war to make a treaty with the emperor Constantine. In fact, if one accepts the evidence of the common Syriac source as transmitted by Theophanes, ‘Abd al-Malik began the treaty-negotiations with Constantine, but Justinian had come to the throne by the time the treaty was formally ratified. For the most part, the author of the Chron. 741 describes the same conditions to this treaty as do Theophanes, Michael the Syrian, and the Chron. 1234:

Since he perceived his troops to be weakened more and more by fighting so much successively, Marwān, king of one side, sent envoys and requested beseechingly from Constantine Augustus that a peace be granted to him. A peace of 9 years was granted to him on these conditions: that the king of the Saracens release to their own lands unharmed the captives and deserters found in all the provinces of the Saracens and pay to the Roman emperor the quantity of one thousand gold solidi of proven weight, one girl, one hairy Arab mule, and a silk garment daily without interruption for 9 years in succession.11

The most interesting difference as far as one is here concerned is the revelation that ‘Abd al-Malik had agreed to return all captives or deserters to the Byzantine authorities. When one reads this description of the treaty in conjunction with that preserved by the witnesses to the common Syriac source, it becomes clear that their description of the return of the Mardaites to the Byzantine empire describes the fulfillment by ‘Abd al-Malik of the Byzantine demand for the return of captives and deserters as described by the author of the Chron. 741. So were the Mardaites captives or deserters ? Two factors point to their identification as deserters. First, as noted above, the fact that ‘Abd al-Malik settled a group of Slavic deserters in their former settlements suggests that they had been deserters beforehand also. Second, the fact that the Byzantine authorities seem to have forced them to serve as oarsmen in the navy following their return suggests that they considered, first, that the Mardaites had some form of military background, and second, that they deserved some form of punishment duty. Since life as an oarsman would have been physically tough, and far more dangerous than that of a normal soldier in that bad weather would have been as serious a danger as actual contact with the enemy, one does not doubt that the Byzantine authorities had experienced the same difficulty in crewing their ships as had many other navies before and after them. The sudden return of a group of several thousand deserters (or sons of deserters) would have provided a neat solution to this man-power problem.12 One does not doubt that the Mardaites served under compulsion at first, so that their position should probably be compared to that of the Coptic crews of the Egyptian contingent of the Arab navy, for example, but that as time passed, they became more integrated within Byzantine society once more and came to provide some marines as well as mere oarsmen.13

The next point to consider is when or in what circumstances the Mardaites deserted to the Arab side. As has been noted above, the witnesses to the common Syriac source agree in claiming that the Mardaites arrived in the territory from the Black Mountain to Jerusalem or Galilee during the 9th year of Constantine which should be identifiable as the year 677, or thereabouts. Here one must ignore the formal dating preserved by the witnesses to the common Syriac source and focus on the sequence of events

instead. This notice occurs at the end of a series of notices describing the events surrounding the so-called siege of Constantinople where the author of the common Syriac source has clumsily conflated materials from two different sources so as to push the date of some of the events surrounding this attack forward from the mid-660s to the early 670s. Hence the description of the settlement of the Mardaites in Arab territory must be seen as part of the aftermath of Yazīd b. Mu‘āwiya’s great expedition against Constantinople. The Mardaites are identifiable as soldiers who deserted to his side during the course of his great journey from the Hexapolis to Constantinople, then back to Damascus again. Since Mu‘āwiya settled these deserters at Antioch and Cyrrhus in the same way that he had previously settled the Slavic garrison of Amorium at Seleuceia ad Belum, it is tempting to assume that the garrisons of some other towns had surrendered to Yazīd in the same way that the garrison of Amorium had surrendered to ‘Abd al-Rahmān b. Khālid in 662. This is possible, but one should not forget the origin of Yazīd’s expedition. It began as an attempt by Mu‘āwiya to assist the Byzantine rebel commander Saborius, but took a new course following the accidental death of Saborius.14 The question which one needs to ask here is what happened to those officers and soldiers who had been most instrumental in raising Saborius to the throne following his unexpected death. They can only have expected torture and death when those loyal to Constans II regained control. Since the Arab general Fadālah had already arrived to assist Saborius by the time he died, the most probable explanation is that those most deeply implicated in the rebellion of Saborius sought refuge with Fadālah following his death. They then followed Fadālah when he was joined by Yazīd and the two of them began their journey to Constantinople. Hence it was former supporters of the rebel general Saborius who probably formed the bulk of the Byzantine deserters who were eventually settled at Antioch and Cyrrhus where they soon became known as the Mardaites. This brings us to the term ‘Mardaite’ itself. What is its significance ? It seems to be a Graecized form of the Syriac ‘marīdōyē’ meaning ‘rebel’. It has traditionally been assumed that they gained this name because of their role in inciting rebellion against the Arab authorities. Michael the Syrian reveals that they were also called ‘līpūrē’ and this seems to be a transliteration of a Greek term meaning ‘deserter’. Again, it has traditionally been assumed that the Mardaites gained this term because they had deserted the Arab side, or attracted deserters from the Arab side. In light of the above discussion, it is clear that the Mardaites gained these titles because they rebels against or deserters from the Byzantine army rather than rebels against or deserters from Arab rule.

A final point. In a notice for AM6179 and the 2nd year of Justinian (686/87) Theophanes describes how Justinian apparently received the Mardaites into the Byzantine empire once more in Armenia:

The emperor went to Armenia and received there the Mardaites of Lebanon, thereby destroying a brazen wall. He also broke the peace that had been concluded with the Bulgars, upsetting the formal treaty made by his own father, and ordered the cavalry themata to cross over to Thrace, intending to conquer the Bulgars and the Sklavinias.15

It is odd that ‘Abd al-Malik should have returned the Mardaites to the Byzantine empire by way of Armenia, when it ought to have been much easier and quicker to send them by sea, perhaps via Cyprus, to Lycia or Pamphylia. Furthermore, none of the other main witnesses to the common Syriac source support Theophanes in this claim. In fact, the context reveals that Theophanes has composed this passage himself as a bridging piece between his last description of Byzantine military activities in AM6178, where he drew his material almost entirely from the common Syriac source and ended with the Byzantine invasion of Armenia, and his next description of Byzantine military activities in AM6180, where he drew his entire material from his Constantinopolitan source and described a Byzantine expedition against Sklavinia and Bulgaria. Since his material for AM6178 described how Justinian had apparently agreed to recall the Mardaites from the Lebanon, Theophanes seems to have felt that he should date the actual recall itself to the following year. He also seems to have assumed that Justinian would have wanted to inspect his newly conquered territories in the east, if he had not already played a personal role in their conquest. Hence his conclusion that Justinian had probably received the Mardaites when he was in Armenia.

In summary, the original Mardaites were deserters from the Byzantine army, probably former supporters of the rebel Saborius, whom Mu‘āwiya settled at Antioch and Cyrrhus in northern Syria c.667. However, ‘Abd al-Malik was forced to return all deserters to the Byzantine authorities according to the treaty which he agreed with Justinian II in 685. Hence the Mardaites spent about 18 years in northern Syria before they were deported to the Byzantine empire once more. This allowed them to become integrated with the local Syriac population, who seem to have referred to them as the ‘marīdōyē’ (rebels). This term seems to have lost whatever pejorative meaning it originally had, so that the deserters gradually adopted a Graecized form of this term to describe themselves also, and retained this title, and their group identity, when deported back to the Byzantine empire. Unfortunately, the author of the common Syriac source, and those who re-edited his source after him, tended to reinterpret the original notices concerning the arrival of the Mardaites in the Arab empire and their subsequent deportation again according to their knowledge of the behaviour and reputation of the Mardaites in their own day. In its original form, the notice describing the arrival of the Mardaites in Arab territory had probably said no more than that the Mardaites had settled at Antioch and Cyrrhus in that year. Because of their contemporary reputation as oarsmen and marines, the author of the common Syriac source assumed that they must have arrived by sea, and that their settlement had represented a Byzantine attack. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Similarly, he seems to have reinterpreted a brief description of the deportation of the Mardaites from Arab territory in 685 to mean that Justinian had reluctantly conceded to a demand by ‘Abd al-Malik to recall his allies. In fact, ‘Abd al-Malik had probably reluctantly conceded to a demand by Justinian.

* The research for this paper was conducted during my tenure of a Research Fellowship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the academic year 2004-05. It represents an abstract from a book-length manuscript which I am currently finalizing.

1 See the summary of earlier literature by M. Moosa, ‘The Relation of the Maronites of Lebanon to the Mardaites and al-Jarājima’, Speculum 44 (1969), 597-608; A.N. Stratos, Byzantium in the Seventh Century IV: AD668-685 (Amstersdam, 1978), 39-45.

2 In general, see L. Conrad, ‘The Conquest of Arwād: A Source-Critical Study in the Historiography of the Early Medieval Near East’, in A. Cameron and L. Conrad (eds.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems in the Literary Source Material (Princeton, 1992), 317-401, who identifies the author of this common source as Theophilus of Edessa.

3 It is normally assumed that the Mardaites were set the same military role upon their return to Byzantine territory in the seventh century as they continued to perform in the tenth century. See e.g. W. Treadgold, ‘The Army in the Works of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’, Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici 29 (1992), 77-162, at 115- 21. By the tenth-century there were actually two different groups of Mardaites, the Mardaites in Pamphylia and the ‘Mardaites of the West’, but their relationship is unclear. See Const. Porph. de Admin. Imp. 50.169-220; de Cer. 2.44.39-44, 58-63, 79-82, 87-91, and 45.33-34, 77-85 (ed. Haldon).

8 Michael 11.15, 446/470. Cf. Theoph. AM6178, 363, where it is claimed that ‘Abd al-Malik occupied Cercusium and Theoupolis. This is a corrupt reference to his settlement of the Slavic deserters at Cyrrhus and Antioch. This element of Theophanes’ text derives from the common Syriac source, although Mango and Scott (n. 4) fail to perceive this in their translation and commentary.

9 Theoph. Chron. AM6252, 431.

10 R.G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, 1997), 425, remarks that it is tempting to postulate that the Chron. 741 depends on the same Greek translation of the common Syriac source as used by Theophanes. In contrast, I suspect that the author of the Chron. 741 derives his information from the Greek source which the author of the common Syriac source had relied on as his main source for the seventh century at least.

11 Chron. 741, 29. Trans. Hoyland (n. 10), 621.

12 The claim by author of the common Syriac source that Justinian received a group of 12,000 Mardaites must be read in conjunction with his claim that the caliph Marwan II killed a rebel army of 12,000 men c.744 (Theoph. Chron. AM6236, 421; Chron. 1234, 1.317), or the claim by al-Balādhurī that Mu‘āwiya settled 12,000 soldiers in Cyprus c.653 (Futūh al-buldān, 153). This seems to be a stock figure, and should not be taken seriously. J. Haldon, ‘Theory and Practice in Tenth-Century Military Administration’, Travaux et Mémoires 13 (2000), 201-352, at 249, n. 45, rightly warns against theories based on the fact that there seem to have been 12,300 Mardaites in the sub-divisions of the original Cibyrrhaeot theme by 911 and that Justinian II had allegedly received 12,000 Mardaites into the empire.

13 Scattered references, and the propensity of the Coptic crews to desert when they had the chance, suggests that the majority were conscripts. In general, see F. Trombley, ‘Sawīrus ibn al-Muqaffa‘ and the Christians of Umayyad Egypt: War and Society in Documentary Context’, in P.M. Sijpesteijn and L. Sundelin (eds.), Papyrology and the History of Early Islamic Egypt (Leiden, 2004), 199-226, at 207-8 and 219-20. This comparison between the Byzantine and Arab navies is valid because Constans II created the Byzantine navy in response to and imitation of the Arab navy. See C. Zuckerman, ‘Learning from the Enemy and More: Studies in “Dark Centuries” Byzantium’, Millenium 2 (2005), 79-135.